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it is, rather, an anthology of assumptions, some of them right,
some of them wrong, all of them unargued. He is right, for ex–
ample,
to
fear nuclear war, but he is also banal. He is for deter–
rence and against nuclear war fighting. Good. That much can in–
deed be learned from the
New York Review of Books.
But how
exactly does Dickstein, who is in a state of great agitation about
the likelihood of the apocalypse, want deterrence to
be
managed?
Plainly he is against the MX. Also good. Is he, then, for the D-5?
The Midgetman? Has he studied the Soviet version of nuclear
strategy? What implications would he draw from it for American
strategy? Is he sure that NATO does not need the Pershings? How
would he address the conventional imbalance in Europe? Is he for
the zero option, or zero-plus, or do the SS-20s not trouble him at
all? About all these things, silence. He has dodged, in short, all the
difficult questions, and while he appears to think much about our
predicament, he seems dead to its details. But citations from
George Kennan and McGeorge Bundy do not quite constitute a
seriously considered position.
The job description of an intellectual includes the ability to
make distinctions. In this respect Dickstein is delinquent, and in a
way that moves you to despair about the condition of the intel–
lectuals.
It
is true that there are "critics of the peace movement"
who see a Soviet hand in all forms of present protest. But it is also
true that there are critics of the peace movement who do not.
There are those who criticize the peace movement, or most of it,
with respect. They accuse it not of being "anti-American" but of
being wrong-and not even wrong in everything. But there is no
room for such criticism in Dickstein's scheme of things. The
scheme has a familiar look.
If
you are not part of the solution, you
are part of the problem.
If
you are against the freeze, you are for
"holy war."
If
you are anticommunist, you are a Somocista.
Dickstein is correct, but he hurts himself,
to
invoke the 1950s,
when anti-Stalinists were indistinguishable for some on the left
from pro-McCarthyites, when the independent criticism of
Stalinist "well-meaning idealists," whatever its moral and phil–
osophicallegitimacy, was attacked as the work of the devil. (May
I recomend to Dickstein a recent essay in the April 23 issue of
The
Nation
that has a basis in reality-Andrew Kopkind's "The
Return of Cold War Liberalism," which will introduce some
cartographic complications into Dickstein's map of the intellec-
